Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 1-50

 

hAp 1-50. The narrator remembers Apollo, who comes to Olympus and shares the other gods; but Leto undoes his weapons and shows him to his seat, where Zeus toasts him. The narrator tells Leto to rejoice, who bore admirable children. The narrator wonders how to hymn Apollo, since the whole 'range of song' is laid out for Apollo. He decides on how Leto bore Apollo, who now rules over everyone that a catalogue of places contains. Leto went to all those places trying to give birth but none dared receive her, until she came to Delos.

1) the opening is weird to me, in its mix of narrative and generalizing statement. I think Jenny Strauss Clay built up a whole theory around the hymns as all about integrating the new gods to Olympus, which does kinda work here narratively, but I feel like doesn't capture the strange formal elements of this 'proem'

2) This hymn, like Demeter, has a large scope of action; but whereas Demeter, I think, emphasized land/sea/sky and Olympus/land/Hades, here we have a division of the world between mainland and islands:

πάντῃ γάρ τοι, Φοῖβε, νομὸς βεβλήαται ᾠδῆς, 

ἠμὲν ἀν' ἤπειρον πορτιτρόφον ἠδ' ἀνὰ νήσους. 

πᾶσαι δὲ σκοπιαί τοι ἅδον καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι 

ὑψηλῶν ὀρέων ποταμοί θ' ἅλα δὲ προρέοντες, 

ἀκταί τ' εἰς ἅλα κεκλιμέναι λιμένες τε θαλάσσης.

3) The catalog is super fun. There's a map of it in this article: https://journals.openedition.org/mondesanciens/3339

three points of interest:

a) fittingly for the mainland/island division, there's a lot of islands in this catalog

b) interesting how little of mainland Greece is here (though we'll get a lot of mainland Greece in the Delphic portion of the hymn), and interesting how well described Asia Minor and its islands are. the presumably archaizing catalogue of the ships in the Iliad basically omits Asia Minor entirely for the Greeks.

c) line 37 shares a formula from Il. 24: Λέσβος τ' ἠγαθέη Μάκαρος ἕδος Αἰολίωνος vs. ὅσσον Λέσβος ἄνω Μάκαρος ἕδος ἐντὸς ἐέργει